“And what is Dr. Penninger working on?”
“Well, you can ask her that yourself!” Greta had arrived. Gazzaniga tactfully absented himself.
Oscar apologized for having interrupted her work.
“No, that’s all right,” Greta said serenely. “I’m going to make the time for you. I think it’s worth it.”
“That’s very broad-minded of you.”
“Yes,” she said simply.
Oscar gazed about her laboratory. “It’s odd that we should meet inside a place like this…I can tell that this locale suits you perfectly, but for me, this has such a strong personal resonance…Can we talk privately here?”
“My lab is not bugged. Every surface in here is sterilized twice a week. Nothing as large as a listening device could possibly survive in here.” She noticed his skeptical reaction, and changed her mind. She reached out and turned a switch on a homogenizer, which began to make a comforting racket.
Oscar felt much better. They were still in plain sight, but at least the noise would drown audio eavesdropping. “Do you know how I define ‘politics,’ Greta?”
She looked at him. “I know that politics means a lot of trouble for scientists.”
“Politics is the art of reconciling human aspirations.”
She considered this. “Okay. So?”
“Greta, I need you to level with me. I need to find some reasonable people who can testify in the upcoming Senate hearing. The standard talking heads from senior management just won’t do anymore. I need people with some street-level awareness of what’s really going on at this facility.”
“Why ask me? Why don’t you ask Cyril Morello or Warren Titche? Those guys have tons of time for political activism.”
Oscar was already very aware of Morello and Titche. They were two of Collaboratory’s grass-roots community leaders, though as yet they were quite unaware of that fact. Cyril Morello was the assistant head of the Human Resources Department, a man who through his consistently self-defeating, anti-careerist actions had won the trust of the Collaboratory rank and file. Warren Titche was the lab’s vociferous token radical, a ragged-elbowed zealot who fought for bike racks and cafeteria menus as if failure meant nuclear holocaust.
“I’m not asking you for a list of specific gripes. I have a long list of those already. What I need is, well, how shall I put this…The spin, the big picture. The pitch. The Message. You see, the new Congress has three brand-new Senators on the Science Committee. They lack the in-depth experience of the Committee’s very, very long-serving former chairman, Senator Dougal of Texas. It’s really an entirely new game in Washington now.”
Greta glanced surreptitiously at her watch. “Do you really think this is going to help anything?”
“I’ll cut to the chase. Let me put a simple question to you. Let’s assume you have absolute power over federal science policy, and can have anything you please. Give me the blue-sky version. What do you want?”
“Oh! Well!” She was interested now. “Well, I guess…I’d want American science to be just like it was in the Golden Age. That would be in the Communist Period, during Cold War One. You see, back in those days, if you had a strong proposal, and you were ready to work, you could almost always swing decent, long-term federal funding.”
“As opposed to the nightmare you have now,” Oscar prompted. “Endless paperwork, bad accounting, senseless ethics hassles…”
Greta nodded reflexively. “It’s hard to believe how far we’ve fallen. Science funding used to be allocated by peer review from within the science community. It wasn’t doled out by Congress in pork-barrel grants for domestic political advantage. Nowadays, scientists spend forty percent of their working time mooching around for funds. Life in science was very direct, in the good old days. The very same person who swung the grant would do her own benchwork and write up her own results. Science was a handicraft, really. You’d have scientific papers written by three, four co-authors—never huge krewes of sixty or eighty, like we’ve got now.”
“So it’s economics, basically,” Oscar coaxed.
She leaned forward tautly. “No, it’s much deeper than that. Twentieth-century science had an entirely different arrangement. There was understanding between the government and the science community. It was a frontier mentality. Those were the gold-rush days. National Science Foundation. NIH. NASA. ARPA…And the science agencies held up their end of the deal. Miracle drugs, plastics, whole new industries…people literally flew to the moon!”
Oscar nodded. “Producing miracles,” he said. “That sounds like a steady line of work.”
“Sure, there was job security back then,” Greta said. “Tenure was nice, in particular. Have you ever heard of that old term ‘tenure’?”
“No,” Oscar said.
“It was all too good to last,” Greta said. “National government controlled the budgets, but scientific knowledge is global. Take the Internet—that was a specialized science network at first, but it exploded. Now tribesmen in the Serengeti can log on directly over Chinese satellites.”
“So the Golden Age stopped when the First Cold War ended?” Oscar said.
She nodded. “Once we’d won, Congress wanted to redesign American science for national competitiveness, for global economic warfare. But that never suited us at all. We never had a chance.”
“Why not?” Oscar said.
“Well, basic research gets you two economic benefits: intellectual property and patents. To recoup the investment in R&D, you need a gentlemen’s agreement that inventors get exclusive rights to their own discoveries. But the Chinese never liked ‘intellectual property.’ We never stopped pressuring them about the issue, and finally a major trade war broke out, and the Chinese just called our bluff. They made all English-language intellectual property freely available on their satellite networks to anybody in the world. They gave away our store for nothing, and it bankrupted us. So now, thanks to the Chinese, basic science has lost its economic underpinnings. We have to live on pure prestige now, and that’s a very thin way to live.”
“China bashing’s out of style this year,” Oscar said. “How about bashing the Dutch?”
“Yeah, Dutch appropriate-technology…The Dutch have been going to every island, every seashore, every low-lying area in the world, making billions building dikes. They’ve built an alliance against us of islands and low-lying states, they get in our face in every international arena…They want to reshape global scientific research for purposes of ecological survival. They don’t want to waste time and money on things like neutrinos or spacecraft. The Dutch are very troublesome.”
“Cold War Two isn’t on the agenda of the Senate Science Committee,” Oscar said. “But it certainly could be, if we could build a national security case.”
“Why would that help?” Greta shrugged. “Bright people will make huge sacrifices, if you’ll just let them work on the things that really interest them. But if you have to spend your life grinding out results for the military, you’re just another cubicle monkey.”
“This is good!” Oscar said. “This is just what I was hoping for—a frank and open exchange of views.”
Her eyes narrowed. “You want me to be really frank, Oscar?”
“Try me.”
“What did the Golden Age get us? The public couldn’t handle the miracles. We had an Atomic Age, but that was dangerous and poisonous. Then we had a Space Age, but that burned out in short order. Next we had an Information Age, but it turned out that the real killer apps for computer networks are social disruption and software piracy. Just lately, American science led the Biotech Age, but it turned out the killer app there was making free food for nomads! And now we’ve got a Cognition Age waiting.”
“And what will that bring us—your brand-new Cognition Age?”
“Nobody knows. If we knew what the outcome would be in advance, then it wouldn’t be basic research.”
Oscar blinked. “Let me get this straight. You’re dedicating your l
ife to neural research, but you can’t tell us what it will do to us?”
“I can’t know. There’s no way to judge. Society is too complex a phenomenon, even science is too complex. We’ve just learned so incredibly much in the past hundred years…Knowledge gets fragmented and ultraspecialized, scientists know more and more about less and less…You can’t make informed decisions about the social results of scientific advances. We scientists don’t even really know what we know anymore.”
“That’s pretty frank, all right. You’re frankly abandoning the field, and leaving science policy decisions to the random guesses of bureaucrats.”
“Random guesses don’t work either.”
Oscar rubbed his chin. “That sounds bad. Really bad. It sounds hopeless.”
“Then maybe I’m painting too dark a picture. There’s a lot of life in science—we’ve made some major historic discoveries, even in the past ten years.”
“Name some for me,” Oscar said.
“Well, we now know that eighty percent of the earth’s biomass is subterranean.”
Oscar shrugged. “Okay.”
“We know there’s bacterial life in interstellar space,” Greta said. “You have to admit that was big.”
“Sure.”
“There have been huge medical advances in this century. We’ve defeated most cancers. We cured AIDS. We can treat pseudo-estrogen damage,” Greta said. “We have one-shot cures for cocaine and heroin addiction.”
“Too bad about alcoholism, though.”
“We can regenerate damaged nerves. We’ve got lab rats smarter than dogs now.”
“Oh, and of course there’s cosmological torque,” Oscar said. They both laughed. It seemed impossible that they could have overlooked cosmological torque, even for an instant.
“Let me switch perspectives,” Oscar said. “Tell me about the Collaboratory. What’s your core competency here in Buna—what does this facility do for America that is unique and irreplaceable?”
“Well, there’s our genetic archives, of course. That’s what we’re world-famous for.”
“Hmmm,” Oscar said. “I recognize that gathering all those specimens from all around the world was very difficult and expensive. But with modern techniques, couldn’t you duplicate those genes and store them almost anywhere?”
“But this is the logical place for them. We have the genetic safety vaults. And the giant safety dome.”
“Do you really need a safety dome? Genetic engineering is safe and simple nowadays.”
“Well, sure, but if America ever needs a Class IV biowar facility, we’ve got one right here.” Greta stopped. “And we have first-class agricultural facilities. A lot of crop research goes on here. Overclass people still eat crops. They love our rare animals, too.”
“Rich people eat natural crops,” Oscar said.
“Our biotech research has built whole new industries,” Greta insisted. “Look at what we’ve done to transform Louisiana.”
“Yeah,” Oscar said. “Do you think I should emphasize that in the Senate hearings?”
Greta looked glum.
Oscar nodded. “Let me level with you, Greta, just like you did with me. Let me tell you about the reception you might expect in today’s Congress. The country’s broke, and your administrative costs are through the roof. You have well over two thousand people on the federal payroll here. You don’t generate any revenue yourselves—outside of winning the favor of passing celebrities with nice gifts of fluffy rare animals. You have no major military or national security interests. The biotech revolution is a long-established fact now, it’s not cutting edge anymore, it’s become a standard industry. So what have you done for us lately?”
“We’re protecting and securing the planet’s natural heritage,” Greta said. “We’re conservationists.”
“Come on. You’re genetic engineers, you have nothing to do with ‘nature.’”
“Senator Dougal never seemed to mind a steady flow of federal funds into Texas. We always have state support from the Texas delegation.”
“Dougal is history,” Oscar said. “You know how many cyclotrons the U.S. used to have?”
“‘Cyclotrons’?” Greta said.
“Particle accelerator, a kind of primitive, giant klystron,” Oscar said. “They were huge, expensive, prestigious federal laboratories, and they’re all long gone. I’d like to fight for this place, but we need compelling reasons. We need sound bites that the layman can understand.”
“What can I tell you? We’re not PR experts. We’re only mere, lowly scientists.”
“You’ve got to give me something, Greta. You can’t expect to survive on sheer bureaucratic inertia. You have to make a public case.”
She thought about it seriously. “Knowledge is inherently precious even if you can’t sell it,” Greta said. “Even if you can’t use it. Knowledge is an absolute good. The search for truth is vital. It’s central to civilization. You need knowledge even when your economy and government are absolutely shot to hell.”
Oscar thought it over. “‘Knowledge will get you through times of no money better than money will get you through times of no knowledge.’ You know, there might be something to that. I like the sound of it. That’s very contemporary rhetoric.”
“The feds have to support us, because if they don’t, Huey will! Green Huey understands this place, he knows what we do here. Huey will get us by default.”
“I appreciate that point too,” Oscar said.
“At least we earn a living out of this mess,” Greta said. “You can always call it a job-creation effort. Maybe you could declare us all insane and say that labwork is our group therapy. Maybe you could declare the place a national park!”
“Now you’re really brainstorming,” Oscar said, pleased. “That’s very good.”
“What’s in this for you?” Greta said suddenly.
“That’s a fair question.” Oscar smiled winningly. “Let’s just say that since meeting you I’ve been won over.”
Greta stared. “Surely you don’t expect us to believe that you plan to save our bacon, just because you’re flirting with me. Not that I mind all the flirting. But if I’m supposed to vamp my way into saving a multimillion-dollar federal facility, the country’s in worse shape than I thought.”
Oscar smiled. “I can flirt and work at the same time. I’m learning a lot by this discussion, it’s very useful. For instance, the way you stroked your hair behind your left ear when you said, ‘Maybe you could declare us all insane and say that labwork is our group therapy.’ That was a very beautiful moment—a little spark of personal fire in the middle of a very dry policy discussion. That would have looked lovely on-camera.”
She stared at him. “Is that what you think about me? Is that how you look at me? It is, isn’t it? You’re actually being sincere.”
“Of course I am. I need to know you better. I want to understand you. I’m learning a lot. You see, I’m from your government, and I’m here to help you.”
“Well, I want to know you better. So you’re not leaving this lab before I get some blood samples. And I’d like to do some PET-scans and reaction tests.”
“See, we do have real commonalities.”
“Except I still don’t understand why you’re doing this.”
“I can tell you right now where my loyalties lie,” Oscar said. “I’m a patriot.”
She looked at him nonplussed.
“I wasn’t born in America. In point of fact, I wasn’t even born. But I work for our government because I believe in America. I happen to believe that this is a unique society. We have a unique role in the world.”
Oscar whacked the lab table with an open hand. “We invented the future! We built it! And if they could design or market it a little better than we could, then we just invented something else more amazing yet. If it took imagination, we always had that. If it took enterprise, we always had it. If it took daring and even ruthlessness, we had it—we not only built the atomic bomb,
we used it! We’re not some crowd of pious, sniveling, red-green Europeans trying to make the world safe for boutiques! We’re not some swarm of Confucian social engineers who would love to watch the masses chop cotton for the next two millennia! We are a nation of hands-on cosmic mechanics!”
“And yet we’re broke,” Greta said.
“Why should I care if you clowns don’t make any money? I’m from the government! We print the money. Let’s get something straight right now. You people face a stark choice here. You can sit on your hands like prima donnas, and everything you’ve built will go down the tubes. Or you can stop being afraid, you can stop kneeling. You can get on your feet as a community, you can take some pride in yourselves. You can seize control of your own future, and make this place what you know it ought to be. You can organize.”
Oscar was physically safe from assault inside the Collaboratory’s Hot Zone. But harassment by random maniacs had made his life politically impossible. Rumor flashed over the local community as swiftly as fire in a spacecraft. People were avoiding him; he was trouble; he was under a curse. Under these difficult circumstances, Oscar thought it wisest to tactfully absent himself. He devised a scheme to cover his retreat.
Oscar took the Bambakias tour bus into the Collaboratory’s vehicle repair shed. He had the bus repainted as a Hazardous Materials emergency response vehicle. This had been Fontenot’s suggestion, for the wily ex-fed was a master of disguise. Fontenot pointed out that very few people, even roadblockers, would knowingly interfere with the ominous bulk of a vivid yellow Haz-Mat bus. The local Collaboratory cops were delighted to see Oscar leaving their jurisdiction, so they were only too eager to supply the necessary biohazard paint and decals.
Oscar departed before dawn in the repainted campaign bus, easing through an airlock gate without announcement or fanfare. He was fleeing practically alone. He took only an absolutely necessary skeleton retinue: Jimmy de Paulo, his driver; Donna Nunez, his stylist; Lana Ramachandran, his secretary; and, as cargo, Moira Matarazzo.
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